Media – Page 2 – Wis[s]e Words

Guy Halsall has a blog

Published on August 11, 2011

Bully for him, you might think, and just who is Guy Halsall anyway? Well, he’s an historian specialising in the period I’m most interested in myself at the moment, Late Antiquity/Early Middle Ages, who I first heard of being ~~slagged off~~ gently corrected by Peter Heather in his latest 1,000 page history, Empires and Barbarians for getting the impact of barbarian invasions on the Roman Empire All Wrong. So I had to read this fellow Halsall’s work for himself and found Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 one of the better one volume explorations of how the Western Roman Empire came to an end, his differences with Heather being one of degree rather than kind, as far as I could make out. In our always on, 24/7 wireless mobile internet connected world it should not come as a surprise a professional historian like Guy Halsall has a blog, but I still can’t take this for granted, especially not when it leads to posts like this, where Halsall examines why we are so wedded to barbarian invasions as explenation for the “Fall of Rome”:

The barbarian is the classic ‘subject presumed to’. The barbarian can change the world; he can bring down empires; he can create kingdoms. The barbarian dominates history. ‘He’ is not like ‘us’, enmeshed in our laws, our little lives and petty responsibilities. The barbarians in the vision of Peter Heather, are peoples with ‘coherent aims’, which they set out single-mindedly to achieve. No people in the whole of recorded human history have ever had single coherent sets of aims. Well – none other than the barbarians anyway.

And finding Halsall’s blog (through a post from Nicola Griffith I should add) led inevitably to discovering a whole slew of likeminded blogs, now listed under “Science” in my blogroll. There are days when the internet looks small and dreary and all your usual blog friends are silent, not saying anything of interest. And then there are days when you cut around a corner and find whole vistas opening up. This is one of those days. It’s not any day I find four new brilliant blogs: Guy Halsall’s, Blogenspiel, Medieval History Geek and last but certainly not least, A Corner of Tenth Century History, where posts like this one make me very jealous and slightly in awe — why can’t I write like this?

Wilderness of mirrors

Published on June 14, 2011

Simon Reynolds reviews an Indonesian rock anthology:

another example of the trend of reissue labels moving into the pasts of foreign countries and finding there a kind of narcissistic mirror image of Western pop and rock, a mirror-image that’s slightly askew. but only very slightly. so Those Shocking, Shaking Days is really hot, fiercely played early 70s hard ‘n’ heavy rock with a bluesy groove funk energy (the kind of stuff Woebot might dice into chunklets for recycling) but betrays zero traces of gamelan or much else Indonesian… so it’s like we’re going abroad but all we’re discovering is another facet of ourselves, our own cultural hegemony…

Which is sorta-kinda another example of what I was getting at yesterday. This isn’t quite cultural appropriation because nothing of the other culture is taken; it’s just feedback from our own cultural imperialism. Importing this feedback just reinforces our own cultural narcissism without engaging with the people behind the product we’re consuming or the cultural context in which they operated. It’s still all about us.

Confusing “available in English” with “worldwide success”

Published on January 22, 20113 Comments

Earlier this week, Tom Spurgeon linked to an article in The Irish Times on French comics and their supposed failure to become a success abroad:

Perhaps the chief reason for this relative obscurity is that the festival celebrates a cultural product that has, to date, stubbornly resisted any and all attempts to export it. Unlike cinema, or jazz, or any of the other artistic endeavours for which France is regularly feted, Francophone comics have, for reasons mysterious, never quite managed to “cross over” and translate local mass-popularity into success on an international stage.

There are, of course, exceptions – most notably the peerless Franco-Belgian duo of Asterix and Tintin, two series that have conquered minds and markets both regional and global. Yet for all their success, these venerable titans represent but the uppermost tip of a thriving, prolific and progressive creative iceberg.

Which is only true if you define “success on an international stage” as “popular in the UK, US and/or other English speaking countries”. It’s true that Franco-Belgian comics have done badly in English, but that doesn’t go for the rest of Europe, or large parts of the rest of the non-English speaking world. That this sort of success is invisible in the Anglo-American parts of the world is due to the failure of the former to pay much attention to anything outside its own borders, rather than due to the lack of this success.

Can’t find Wikileaks?

Published on December 5, 20101 Comment

Try this: http://213.251.145.96/. No luck? More mirrors.

Meanwhile, Counterpunch on the reality behind the rape charges against Julian Assange:

Swedish bloggers uncovered the full story in a few hours. The complaint was lodged by a radical feminist Anna Ardin, 30, a one-time intern in the Swedish Foreign Service. She’s spokeswoman for Broderskapsrörelsen, the liberation theology-like Christian organization affiliated with Sweden’s Social Democratic Party. She had invited Julian Assange to a crayfish party, and they had enjoyed some quality time together. When Ardin discovered that Julian shared a similar experience with a 20-year-old woman a day or two later, she obtained the younger woman’s cooperation in declaring before the police that changing partners in so rapid a manner constituted a sort of deceit. And deceit is a sort of rape. The prosecutor immediately issued an arrest warrant, and the press was duly notified. Once the facts were examined in the cold light of day, the charge of rape seemed ludicrous and was immediately dropped. In the meantime the younger woman, perhaps realizing how she had been used, withdrew her report, leaving the vengeful Anna Ardin standing alone.

However, before we absolve the Swedish police as unwitting, if zealous, dupes, please note that Swedish law strictly forbids police and prosecutors to release to the media the details of any rape-connected complaint. The Expressen had all the details of the case, including the names of the accused and the complainant, within a matter of minutes. Please note further that the right-wing tabloid Expressen belongs to the Bonnier family, the biggest media owners in Sweden, who are not only pro-American but very much pro-Israel, too. As you know, the pro-Israeli lobby is warmly supportive of America’s Middle Eastern wars, while Assange and his WikiLeaks have the potential to undermine America’s weakening support for the war.

Wikileaks is a necessary corrective force against all our governments, as the past decade has proved that our socalled western democracies do everything to escape public accountability. Having a dedicated organisation that is able to provide us with the 21st century equivalent of the Pentagon Papers on a regular basis is a good thing. So donate.

Behind the Times

Published on July 28, 2010

Jamie writes about strange way in which The Times not just disappeared behind a paywall, but from public consciousness:

But back in the pre-internet days I was certainly aware of the Times as an institution. I had the sense that it would always be there and that it fulfilled a need of some sort. It had an ambient presence, and quite a large one, extending far outside its actual readership.

And now, nothing. Nothing at all. It’s not just a case of not missing it but of forgetting that it was ever there, which is quite odd when you think of the wider social role and meaning it used to have in British life: from Voice of the Establishment to Hermit Kingdom. Or perhaps it’s a consequence of the whole debate about the paywall. If you’re constantly reminded that something is no longer there, then you’re forced to conclude how little it matters. I suppose that’s what happens to hollow institutions when they stop constantly reminding people that they are institutions. I wonder what would happen if you put the Royals behind a paywall.

I’m not sure it’s the dpaywall itself that’s to blame for this. The Times has never had the place in the internet’s public consciousness that a rival paper like The Guardian had. In my own experience, few bloggers actually linked to Times stories and when they did, nine out of ten times the links just disappeared ins blauen hinein anyway. Their competitors like the Indy, Daily Mail and Guardian/Observer were much quicker and smarter in exploiting online attention and controversy, aiming beyond their traditional readers at the casual browser, including large foreign audiences.

The Times has always been something of a prestige object for Murdock, not necessarily needing to make a profit as long as it got the ears of the Westminister elites. Even today that audience is notoriously webshy and technophobe so it maybe that this online disappearance of the newspaper is of less importance than that people like us, for whom nothing exists if not reachable online would assume. That we don’t notice Times generated buzz doesn’t matter, as long as the politicians and Westminister orientated media still do…